Media|How ‘1989’ Edged Out ‘Frozen’ as the No. 1 Album of 2014, and Vice Versa

Supported by

How ‘1989’ Edged Out ‘Frozen’ as the No. 1 Album of 2014, and Vice Versa

Image

Taylor Swift’s “1989,” which was released in October, posted sales of nearly 1.3 million albums in its first week, the fastest a record has sold since 2002.CreditCreditChad Batka for The New York Times

What was the most popular album of 2014? With technology rapidly changing how people listen to music, the answer depends on which numbers you count.

Based on the traditional sales model, Taylor Swift’s “1989,” which sold 3.66 million copies in the United States in formats like CDs and album downloads, narrowly beat Disney’s “Frozen” soundtrack, which moved 3.53 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

But incorporating streaming services like Spotify and YouTube changes the picture. Looked at that way, “Frozen” moved 4.47 million “album equivalent units,” a measurement introduced late last year by SoundScan and Billboard magazine that, in addition to album sales, factors in streams and downloads of individual songs. By this method, “1989” — which was largely unavailable through streaming — came in at 4.40 million.

As streaming grows in popularity, it still faces serious doubts over its viability as a financial model, and competing album sales metrics that yielded two different No. 1 albums illustrate the music industry at a crossroads.

Last year was the second in a row that sales of music downloads dropped in the United States. Some 106.5 million digital albums were sold, down 9.4 percent from 2013, while song sales fell 12.5 percent for the year, to just over 1.1 billion.

Over all, including downloads, CDs and the growing niche of vinyl LPs, some 257 million albums were sold in 2014, down 11.2 percent from the previous year.

Meanwhile, streaming through services like Spotify and Rhapsody increased 54.5 percent in 2014, to nearly 164 billion song streams. The pattern is much the same around the world. In Britain, for example, downloads fell for the first time last year but streaming doubled, according to the British Phonographic Industry, a trade group.

“There is definitely a consumer shift, as the digital consumer seems to be moving away from downloads and toward streaming in massive amounts,” said David Bakula, an analyst at Nielsen.

Image

Bono, right, and The Edge of U2. The band was criticized by some after it gave away its latest album through Apple’s iTunes.CreditSamir Hussein/Getty Images for MTV

Competition among streaming companies grew more intense in 2014. YouTube introduced a paid subscription plan for music, and Apple paid $3 billion for Beats, the headphone company that includes a fledgling subscription music outlet. That deal is expected to play a big part in the future of Apple’s iTunes store, which transformed the digital music market when it was introduced in 2003 but lately has seen a stark drop in consumer interest, music executives say.

Yet streaming is at the center of an intense industry debate about the value of music. In perhaps the year’s most influential decision in the music business, Ms. Swift removed her catalog from Spotify, which has both free and paid versions — a model known as “freemium” — apparently because the company was unwilling to make her music available only to its paying subscribers.

Ms. Swift’s stance made her a hero to many musicians who have fretted over the low royalty rates generated through streaming. It also brought to the fore a long-simmering concern among record executives that services like Spotify and YouTube make so much free music available that consumers have little incentive to buy any.

That concern is driving the big record companies as they renegotiate licensing contracts this year with streaming services. Like Ms. Swift, many artists and labels want more control to introduce staggered release “windows” — withholding albums for a time from streaming’s free tiers, for example, to spur sales. In Ms. Swift’s case, that strategy seemed to work: “1989” had nearly 1.3 million sales in its first week, the fastest any record has sold since 2002.

Analysts worry, however, that placing too many restrictions on such services as they grow will turn away potential customers.

“The biggest near-term challenge will be fixing freemium,” said Mark Mulligan of the firm Midia Research. “There is a risk that freemium will get thrown out with the windowing dishwater, that the major labels will bow to pressure from their boards and from big artists to seriously scale back free streaming.”

Spotify, which is available in 58 markets around the world, is used by 50 million people, 12.5 million of whom pay, according to the company.

In another of the most-talked-about moves by musicians in 2014, U2 teamed up with Apple to give away digital copies of its latest album, “Songs of Innocence.” The plan, which made the album automatically available on users’ iTunes accounts, was criticized by some as an invasion of privacy, and led to an apology from the band.

But Bono, the group’s lead singer, defended it as an experiment in publicizing new music, which remains a concern, even for a superstar act like U2. In a long and candid New Year’s post on the band’s website, Bono also wrote about the need for sorting out the economics of streaming from services like Spotify, which he praised for working to get people to pay for music.

“These payments don’t add up to replacement for income from physical or digital sales at the moment,” he wrote. “But I think they can if everyone sits down — record companies, artists and digital services — to figure out a fairer way of doing business.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Two No. 1 Albums in 2014? It Depends on the Charts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe